Children of the Mountain
by Aeanagwen
Summary: The kid is freaking Sinbad out but good. An exploratory foray into Sinbad and Ja'far's first meeting and subsequent events.
1. Sinbad

He's flat on his back when the first line of pain breaks the skin of his neck, and that's when Sinbad finally realizes, _Damn, this kid could actually kill me._

The thought jerks his foot up to the ground beneath him; he kicks himself and his assailant into a roll. His fingers scrabble for a hold in the cords around the boy's arms as the tarnished steel blades dart for his face again. Just as he catches the slack rope behind the boy's shoulder, something in the floor _clicks_.

The floor gives way beneath them. For Sinbad, the next moment is a gasping whirl of arms and legs, flailing and grabbing at the trapped stone in the frozen seconds. When his heartbeat slams against his chest again to remind him he's alive, he peeks up to find himself alone at the edge of the drop, splayed against the stone as tightly as a storm-drawn halyard. A double line of red runs over the lip of the trap; it twitches a half-inch to the right and he flinches reflexively at the answering jerk at his arm.

He's still got the cord caught in his fist, he realizes, blinking at it dumbly. He closes his other hand around the two lengths of rope with slow care and then climbs back to his feet. His heartbeat still pulsing with a nervous fleetness, he steps cautiously up to the drop and looks over, ready to pull back at the first flicker of flying metal.

The wall of the trap isn't sheer like he thought; worse, it curves inward away from the drop like a concave lens. Some forty feet down, spikes, crags and bodies line the floor. The boy sways in the void like a spider at the end of its thread, fingers clutching white-knuckled at the pendulum length that's keeping him from joining the skeletons below. One small hand unclenches, shaking, and swiftly closes again an inch or two higher, but Sinbad can see at a glance that the kid's stuck. His thin arms are tangled and winched together, and even if they were free, he doesn't have the upper body strength to make a ten foot rope climb with no wall to brace against. He gets one more hand raised before his buckled elbows extend, bare feet kicking at the empty air.

He goes abruptly still. A few seconds pass and Sinbad swallows as the boy looks up at him. The pupils in his flat gray eyes have dilated into wide black circles, but his expression remains blank and remote as he regards the youth above him. The Partevian opens his mouth to speak and something—acknowledgement, Sinbad thinks, or even relief?—moves through the boy's stare. He closes his eyes and his grip goes slack.

"Hey!" Sinbad shouts in dismay, dropping to one knee as the assassin—falls, but only a few inches, wrists still ensnared in the red cording of his weapon.

"Hold on, okay? I'll pull you up!"

_This is stupid, _he thinks feverishly as he wraps his arm twice in the rope and peers over the ledge at the unmoving child below. _He's going to slit my wrist as soon as I give him my hand._

That's _stupid. His arms are trussed up like pork loin._

_They were trussed up before, too, and look how much good _that_ did you—and_ _you had _your _hands _free.

He shakes off the conflicted thoughts and concentrates on pulling—arm over arm, letting his shoulders and waist turn with the movements rather than jostling the ropes about. It should take more effort than it does, and Sinbad wonders if he's gotten stronger or if the boy's just that light.

Something bumps at the underside of the ledge, and Sinbad carefully leans out over the yawning gap to hook one arm under the boy's shoulders and pull him back up. He rolls the blond to the ground and hurriedly backs towards his fallen sword, away from both the assassin and the drop, watching warily. The boy doesn't move.

"…Hey, are you okay?" Sinbad tries after a minute, thinking uncomfortably back to stories he's heard of assassins who'd rather kill themselves than fail at their mission.

The child rolls over, opening his eyes to stare distantly up at the mural-bedecked ceiling. Sinbad follows his glance hesitantly, but sees no answers in the panoramas of djinns and sultans and many-armed monsters.

"Do we really have to fight?" he asks. He wishes he could just say, _We don't have to fight_, but without knowing why the boy's with the assassins, he can't just assume. Everyone has their reasons; otherwise there's no reason to go dungeon-exploring to begin with. "I'm trying to make Partevia a better country. Why do you guys care about that?"

"The assassins don't care."

Sinbad startles and turns back to look at the boy, but the hollow whisper continues before he can speak.

"The emperor of Partevia does."

Sinbad bristles, thinking of his mother lying cold and abandoned on the floor of the place that had been his home; of Drakon's outraged bluster and desperate eyes; of lying awake at night in his one-man craft, staring up at thousands of glittering stars and clutching his sword to his chest, feeling completely adrift in the vastness of an uncaring world.

"The emperor of Partevia should care less about me and more about his people!" he snaps angrily. "If he did I wouldn't have any problems with him at all!"

"What's your solution?" the boy asks. His voice is low and hoarse, like he doesn't use it much, or like—other things. Sinbad's seen discolorations like the ones on his blades before.

"What?" he asks, distracted and off-balance.

"He's a problem. How are you going to solve him?" The boy looks at him again and Sinbad has to fight off a shudder of horror at the dead stare. He firms his jaw and flashes the seal emblazoned on his sword—Baal's eight-pointed star.

"I'll become 'king'," he answers, steady and full of conviction. He hopes he sounds like that, anyway. Inside, he can feel the mar of doubt that's kept him away from his homeland, that drove him to this dungeon on the new island between Partevia and Sindria Kingdom.

Finally, the blond stands. The Partevian hurriedly lifts his sword to a ready stance, but the younger boy ignores him, tugging at the cords of his weapon and respooling them around his forearms where they've bunched up around his elbows and wrists. When he's finished, he stoops to pick up the flat blades from where they drag on the floor and tucks them into his sleeves. He looks up at Sinbad.

"…What?" the older boy asks, sensing that something is expected of him.

"Where are we going now?"

Sinbad's jaw drops.

"Y-you're coming with me?" he sputters. "But why? I mean, you _can_—I mean I'd love you to! But it's just me, and I don't even have a plan or anything, and there's still all those other assassins around, and, I just… Why do you want to go with me all of a sudden?"

The boy goes on staring at him and Sinbad finally falls silent, feeling like an idiot.

"I carried out my duties as I was taught. After failing in my mission, I let go of my life. But you caught me. No one else would have even tried." He recites the facts plainly, like he's going down a list. There's still no emotion in his face, but Sinbad could swear there's something like rebellion in his eyes. He wonders if the kid can even feel it himself. "I 'died.' I was never told what to do afterward. So for now I'll follow you."

"You—are you sure you want to?" The prospect of a companion makes Sinbad's heart leap, but this wasn't exactly how he imagined it happening. And on the one hand, the kid's too young to just leave somewhere, but on the other, no matter what nonsense the kid says about "no one else," Sinbad was just doing the same thing any decent person would have, so it kind of feels like taking advantage to take him on just like that. "I'm not sure where I'm going to go after this. It's going to be really dangerous."

"That's another reason for me to go." The other boy definitely has an emotion in his eyes now, but _condescension _is not really what Sinbad was going for. He walks past Sinbad and heads back up the passage. "You're an idiot."

"Hey!"

The next batch of monster fights conclude much more quickly. In battle, the kid is little more than a blur, a tiny bullet of bandages and hissing cord prefacing a flash of iron and something spraying wrong-colored arterial fluid all over the nearest surface. (Twice in the last few hours this has meant Sinbad. It smells like harbor refuse and he's worried that his hair is going to be permanently dyed bruise-mottled-eggplant if they don't find some water soon.)

Once whatever-it-is lies twitching and bereft of life—and often limb, Sinbad thinks smugly, because that at least is his work—the blond returns to his side, grey eyes distant as he fidgets with the rough linen around his arms and neck. He hasn't strung more than three words at a time together since Sinbad dragged him up out of the pit trap. It's freaking Sinbad out but good.

He hopes Drakon shows up again soon. At least he has brothers; maybe he can help get a handle on how to treat an emotionally-wrecked ten year old. (Okay, Drakon is still after him with assassins. But still. He's got to have at least one useful anecdote somewhere in all that outrage about duty and loyalty…)

Sinbad hops onto a fallen pillar and gingerly assesses the circle of welts raised in an angry red on his abdomen. Across the room, the kid jumps lightly down from the horned crest of the monstrous worm he just rode to the ground via stabbing it in what was probably its brain and comes over, craning his head to see.

"We should rest," he opines, soft but blunt. Sinbad opens his mouth to protest, but stops when he sees the fine tremor in his companion's shoulders, visible mainly by the way it disrupts the lines of the cragged stone walls beyond him. He hasn't complained, but that means nothing. If anything, it's even more damning. Sinbad turns his thoughts away from his mother's tired smile and the unmoving stiffness of hands clenched in blankets to hide their shaking. He nods. Looking around for a likely temporary hideaway, his gaze settles on the gap in the wall the worm had emerged from.

_Should be fine, _he reasons to himself. _If there were any more in there they'd have come out when the big one did. Dungeons are here as tests for humans, not safe ecologies for monsters._

"We can stay in there for a few hours," he says, pointing at the small cave entrance. "Long enough for a meal and a nap, anyway." He exhales as the boy nods and lets the readiness for battle slide off his shoulders like a too-heavy cloak, standing back up.

"So what's your name, anyway?" he asks as they clamber over the felled worm. The blond doesn't look at him, gray eyes fixed on the aperture of stone, but at least he answers.

"Ja'far."

* * *

This is based more in the Prototype manga than the actual Sinbad spin-off, if only because I expect this to be wildly decanonized as soon as the latter gets around to Ja'far's introduction. A present for a friend who wanted Magi worldbuilding. There will be three chapters in all, to be written whenever I need a break from the Fate/Zero fic that's devouring my life.


	2. Ja'far

The day's work is done and it's time for a rest. The hours are unusual, but the principle is the same, and so the need drags at his veins and tugs a familiar pressure somewhere behind his eyes. He has no fire, though. He looks up.

The worm tunnel spirals off in three directions: farther off into the darkness of the dungeon walls, upward at an easy foothill's angle, and back towards the entrance they used, where Sinbad is fiddling with loose stones and his coat, trying to cover the hole.

It should be safe. Ja'far unwinds some of the bandages around his right leg and cuts the strip smoothly away. He bunches it up loosely on the ground in front of him. It needs a bit more, so he pulls up the threadbare edge of his shirt and begins to saw at it with one blade.

"What are you doing?" The tearing noise catches Sinbad's attention, and the other boy comes over, sitting down across from him and giving him a look that begins curious and turns disturbed when the Partevian's eyes land on his leg. "What happened there?" He gestures at the long scar that runs up the inside of Ja'far's leg, from halfway up his calf to the very top of his thigh, a deep weal of puckered skin. The blond gives it a dispassionate look.

"The old man did it," he answers. He doesn't remember getting this scar himself; he was too young, but he's seen it done to others, newcomers to the mountain.

Sinbad's chin pulls back, a faint jerk. As Ja'far finally gets the scrap of cloth loose, the older boy manages, "Someone did that to you on purpose? Why?"

Ja'far tucks his blade back in his sleeve and sets to tying loose knots in the cloth; they'll make the fire last longer.

"It's to keep us from walking for the first few weeks," he answers as he works. "The old man says that's how long it takes to make the first foothold."

"Foothold?" Sinbad echoes, and Ja'far nods, arranging a knotted cloth in a ring and sliding a battered tinderbox out of his pocket.

"For the training," he answers, neutral. "You have to be malleable to learn it."

"Hey. That's not going to make much of a fire." Sinbad's brows lower as he changes topics, voice doubtful. "Are you cold? I could go get my cloak."

"It's not _for _warmth. It's for the hasanava." Ja'far moves to strike a spark, then stills and looks up at Sinbad when the older boy puts a hand on his wrist.

"Hasanava as in nava leaves? Not in here, okay? I don't want to have to breathe that stuff in too, you know."

The blond stares at him.

"The mission is over," he says, slow and explanatory. "I have to now."

Blood on stone, he remembers, an old man's throat opened beneath his diamond blade. Screaming when the body collapsed back against him, though he'd done so well to not flinch during the ceremony. Being ushered by sympathetic but firm hands to the cord and pipe as Fatima's voice talked him through the first inhalations, her nails combing soothing lines through his hair until the hasanava had taken over.

Hasanava after missions. That's how it works.

"What mission? You left the assassins, right? You don't have to do that anymore."

Ja'far goes on staring. Hasanava after missions is how it's _done, _but it's true that he didn't properly finish the last one. He hadn't thought of it that way. But when, then? After they escape the dungeon? After Sinbad is enthroned? Surely that's too long to wait?

Something rattles in his chest, a stone fragment knocked loose by a sculptor's chisel: fear of breaking ritual and the inevitable punishment. He's sure his expression doesn't change—he's far too old for that kind of weakness—but all the same Sinbad is waving his hands placatingly, giving him a worried look.

"New mission! New mission, okay? We get out of the dungeon and back to my boat, and we can talk about it again there, all right?"

Ja'far nods slowly, looking back down at the small pile of detritus and mutely scooping it into his hands and back into the recesses of his pockets. What else had they come in here for…? Yes, sleep. He tucked himself up against the wall, gathering his ragged mantle about his shoulders and bowing his head towards—

"So that's part of the training, too?" Sinbad's voice breaks the younger boy out of the reverie and draws his eyes back up to where the Partevian is still watching him, eyes dark and unsure. Annoyance flutters somewhere beneath his heart—doesn't Sinbad know how missions are supposed to go at all? How he's managed to survive this long on such lack of discipline, Ja'far can't imagine.

"It's part of everything. It's the way to paradise," he answers. The purple eyes don't clear and he lets out the smallest huff of exasperation. "The old man knows the way. He makes the hasanava to show it to others. Taking it after missions and during ceremonies reminds us that we're on the right path."

"How is killing me on the path to paradise?" Sinbad's voice goes sharp and angry, expression stung. "I'm trying to make things better!"

"It's not my vision," Ja'far replies, indifferent. "But we didn't come to kill you, anyway. The emperor of Partevia asked for you alive."

"Then what was with trying to cut my throat open back there in the upper hallway?"

"Anemia would make you easier to transport."

Silence holds sway for a few moments as Sinbad stares at him—but really, what did he expect? Ja'far looks back, waiting for whatever silly question his new leader is going to ask next.

"And that's how he treats you, huh?"

Ja'far doesn't blink, mostly because he doesn't understand the question.

"How long has he had you smoking nava? It's already messed your voice up. And it's just a drug, anyway! You can buy nava at any port, or a dozen other things to get addicted to; that isn't 'paradise,' just a side-effect! It's just his way of using you!" Sinbad's eyes blaze as he leans forward; Ja'far can't tell if he's still hurting over the remark about the right path or if he's genuinely angry at the old man. It's an overblown response either way.

"Everyone uses everyone else," he answers. "Why are you so mad about—"

"No, they don't, Ja'far!" The use of his name prickles, a quick stinging shock that's much more surprising that Sinband's hands wrapping around his arms and shaking him. "People _help _each other; we help each other to lift up everyone! Things like kings and old men using people weaker than them; that's what I want to change! That's why I want the dungeon's power!"

"So you can make people follow your way instead?" Ja'far holds still under the touch, looking up at Sinbad. "Isn't that just _your_ paradise? I don't mind," he reiterates at the other youth's hiss of breath. "I already said I'd go with you. I just don't understand why you're angry."

Sinbad releases him abruptly, leaning back. He looks away, lips twisting in frustration.

"How long have you been with the old man, Ja'far?" he asks, voice drained to coldness by his efforts to rein in his emotions.

"Since I was six."

Sinbad nods at the answer and turns away, lying down on the stone floor of the cave. His shoulders draw the line of his tunic into a hunched curve, rising once and trembling with the exhale as he mutters, "We'll talk about it again later. If we keep arguing it'll draw the monsters."

_You're the one who's arguing, _Ja'far thinks, but he doesn't say it out loud, just watches the older boy's hands clench to whiteness where they press against his sides. His own weariness is catching him up as well, and he drops his chin down onto his knees, watching his companion's clipped breathing slowly lengthen and steady as his eyes droop closed.

-ooo-

He comes to awareness in a small cave. A glance around the area takes stock, measuring his duties for the day. Light filters dimly into the hideaway through a cloak pinned over one entrance, and lying on the floor in front of him is a boy a few years older than him, purple-haired and snoring faintly—the target, Sinbad of Partevia.

Ja'far doesn't waste time trying to remember how he and the other boy wound up sleeping in here together. Whatever ruse it was must have worked, and now it's only a matter of getting back to the main group.

There's an itch beneath his skin, a restlessness, and the edges of the world are sharp and intrusive; too dark, too massive. Huddled in his mantle, he silently draws out his tinderbox and opens the lid. A crumbling greyish cube sits inside beside the flint—he didn't have any hasanava yesterday. The mission must not be over.

He eyes the sleeping boy's bulk. He can't remember how he coaxed him in here, which means he doesn't know how to coax him back out, and he's much too big to drag. And they're separated from the group, which means Ja'far will have to find the way back to Fatima and the others with the Partevian commander on his own, which he definitely can't do fighting a captive the whole way.

His gaze falls on the hasanava again. He'll probably be punished for taking it before the mission's done, but using it _to _complete the mission… With that he can probably skirt by without getting into _too _much trouble.

The coil of knotted cloth and fragments of bandage in his pockets tell him that he planned for this yesterday. He stands without a sound and moves to the entrance, where he arranges the items on the floor and, eyes darting back and forth to the boy sleeping further in, coaxes up a small flame. His blades slide into his hands easily and he turns the tips back and forth in the heart of the tiny fire, ignoring the heat—this has to be done quickly before the tinder runs out.

When the first wisp of dove-colored smoke rises acridly from the steel darts, he shifts them into one hand and uses the other to draw out a pinch of the hasanava. He drops it onto the point of the top blade and then begins to compress and spread it using the other, eyes half-closing as he ducks his face closer to breathe in the twining smoke.

As ever, the effect takes hold swiftly. He releases a soft sigh as the colors of the cave deepen with purples and dark gemstone greens, the sacred warmth of the hasanava melting through the coldness of his thoughts and leaving him serene and calm.

He returns the tips of the blades to the dying fire, pulling out a larger pinch of the drug. It will give Sinbad vivid visions, moreso than is ideal for traversing a dangerous area, but then, Ja'far can't have him shaking off paradise before the mission's over, can he?

_His hair is pretty_, Ja'far thinks absently as he crouches by the boy, smoking knives held beneath the Parvtevian's nose and slack mouth. _Less shine than Fatima's, but brighter._

"Come on," Ja'far whispers. "We have to get back."

Sinbad opens golden eyes all but devoured by the black discs of his dilated pupils and looks up at him in hazy bewilderment. Ja'far smiles faintly and reaches out to stroke the other boy's hair, remembering Fatima doing him the same kindness for his first dose.

"Come on," he repeats, and Sinbad nods, rising to his feet with an unsteady obediance. Ja'far nods.

"Good. Lets go."

* * *

The drugs and history here are based very loosely on the original assassins, whom you may know from the first Assassin's Creed game if your history teacher didn't like teaching you about things that gave Saladin headaches. Though the stories about them being hashish addicts all worshiping their cult leader is probably a matter of some heated imagination on the part of one Marco Polo, it makes for an interesting story and is involved in the etymology of the word 'assassin'. In any case, I adopted it with some tweaks for use here. Fatima is a cameo from elsewhere; I make no apologies but do wholly blame the gal who instigated this fic.


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